Re: What bugs you about KLISTs in RPG IV?

["Scott Klement" <infosys@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joel Fritz <JFritz@sharperimage.com> wrote:
> Scott:
>
> I think you missed the phrase "nut behind the wheel" in my posting.
>  What I
> was trying to point out was that some C programmers exploit the
>  language's
> potential for terseness in a way that does nothing to improve the
> application's performance.  Pointers and memory management are anoth
>  area
> all together.  If you use dynamic memory allocation, you have to
>  manage
> memory yourself (malloc() can return -1, right?) and it's not easy.
>  We now
> can make memory management mistakes in RPG.

Joel,

I agree that there are poor programmers that write hard to read code
in C.  You seem to me to be suggesting caution in allowing the same
thing to happen in RPG, however.

In my opinion, (and apparently also in yours) someone can write
bad code in any language (and many people do!)

Therefore, lets not lose the big ADVANTAGES, and ways that code can
be made EASIER to follow by cautioning against free-form syntax.

I think if you use subprocedures that return the proper values,
you can already create code that is "too-terse" in RPG.  The
difference is that its all on the right-half of the screen, and
you can't intent it :)

And, no, malloc cannot return -1.   It returns a pointer, not
an integer!
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